But Schiffrin could at least claim a small victory when, to Si Newhouse’s chagrin, a young cartoonist whom Schiffrin had recently discovered left with him and later signed with HarperCollins. Schiffrin, he said, had been “running a very sloppy shop, and publishing a lot of books that no one wanted to read”. Schiffrin’s philosophy was that a good book would find its audience but the imprint’s inability to offer high advances or guarantee publicity is said to have led some erstwhile Schiffrin supporters to take their custom elsewhere.īuoyed by record-breaking results in 1990, when Random House’s revenues soared to nearly $1 billion, Vitale claimed to be unfazed by the row. The New Press is still in business today, publishing about 50 titles each year, but it symbolised both the advantages and limitations of the low-budget publisher. Hundreds more writers signed a public petition, and an editorial in Publishers Weekly declared: “The news cannot help but appal anyone who believes in book publishing as ultimately something more than a plain act of commerce.”Īrmed with his severance pay, Schiffrin raised several million dollars from philanthropic foundations and established a new non-profit imprint, The New Press, which he billed as an attempt to reassert the values of quality against commercialism in publishing. In the days that followed, some 300 literary figures - including Kurt Vonnegut, Studs Terkel and Arno Meyer - picketed Random House in protest. Loftily protesting that corporate bean-counting was incompatible with the nurturing of great literature, Schiffrin resigned - and he was followed by all his senior editors and half his junior staff. Pantheon’s list should be cut from about 120 books to 40, and staff reduced by two-thirds. Pantheon, Vitale told him, was losing $3 million a year (as Schiffrin’s friends observed, this equated to the advance paid by Random House for Nancy Reagan’s memoirs) and would have to make economies. In the end, though, it was the “bottom line”, rather than politics, that did for Schiffrin. Perhaps these could be balanced by some Right-wing volumes? Vitale was said to have been angered by a subsequent editorial in Publishers Weekly which observed: “True publishers publish what they believe in… No true publisher should feel he has to offer a balance to his customers.”
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This mutually beneficial arrangement was challenged in 1990, however, when Random House’s owner Si Newhouse replaced Bernstein with a professional manager, Alberto Vitale.Īccording to Schiffrin, an early indication that all was not well came when he was led to understand that “Random management” felt that Pantheon was publishing too many Left-wing books. I think Random House gained more in prestige than in any money it lost.” Robert Bernstein, who served as president of Random House for much of Schiffrin’s time at Pantheon, recalled: “You always wished André made more, but it wasn’t a big deal.
In financial terms Pantheon always hovered somewhere between the black and red sides of the balance sheet, sometimes falling behind by a million or two. Schiffrin also championed the works of (among others) Eric Hobsbawm, Boris Pasternak, Marguerite Duras, George Kennan, Art Spiegelman, Michel Foucault, Gunnar Myrdal, Simone de Beauvoir, Noam Chomsky and Studs Terkel. Under his leadership, Pantheon published EP Thompson’s The Making Of The English Working Class and David Wyman’s The Abandonment Of The Jews. For nearly 30 years, as managing director of Pantheon, the publishing house co-founded by his father Jacques in 1942, Schiffrin had remained true to his father’s vision of bringing the best Old World writers to the New, and finding radical new voices - all under the benign stewardship of Random House, which bought the imprint in 1961.
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